[Frameworks] Sadie Benning and Jennifer Reeves at Light Industry Tomorrow

[Thomas Beard]

Jennifer Reeves's Chronic + Sadie Benning's Flat Is Beautiful
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 7pm

Light Industry
155 Freeman Street
Brooklyn, New York
www.lightindustry.org


Chronic
Jennifer Reeves, 1996, 16mm, 38 mins

Flat Is Beautiful
Sadie Benning, 1998, video, 50 mins

Loosely based on episodes from the filmmaker’s own life, Jennifer
Reeves’s Chronic tells the story of Gretchen, a Midwestern punk
teenager institutionalized for her, as Reeves puts it, “so-called
mental illness." The film portrays Gretchen’s experiences through a
stream of allusive superimpositions, snatches of dialog, songs played
off crackling vinyl, and unnerving moments of re-enactment. Almost
entirely optically-printed, Chronic revels in the multifarious
textures of celluloid through a complex formal repertoire, linking it
to depictions of subjective states in the films of Stan Brakhage (one
of Chronic's great admirers), but pushing this tradition forward into
the age of the medicalized psyche.

Like Chronic, Sadie Benning’s Flat is Beautiful presents a lushly
lo-fi coming-of-age tale, here told from the perspective of Taylor, a
12-year-old latchkey tomboy being raised by a single mom in run-down
1980s Minneapolis. Exteriors appear in grainy Super-8, while interiors
are shot in fuzzy Pixelvision, and all actors wear hand-drawn masks
throughout; the effect is at once alienating and dreamlike, like
memories grown uncertain over time, or the way that children move
seamlessly between reality and imagination. Taylor’s life, too, echoes
Benning’s own—her artist father, her early stirrings of sexual
identity. “You’re not a boy, you’re a girl, stupid.” her friend taunts
her over the phone. “No, I’m not,” Taylor answers. “Then what are
you?”

Both films are pitch-perfect studies of a particularly downbeat mood
of gen-x feminism, works that found new visual languages to articulate
the vicissitudes of an 80s adolescence.

Followed by a conversation with Benning and Reeves.

Tickets - $7, available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office
opens at 6:30.